A group of elite players in the public radio world joined forces this summer to form a cohesive public broadcasting podcast strategy. Attempting to develop podcasting as a sustainable model for new revenue and audience growth, NPR is hosting podcasts and collecting user data for KQED, KUT, KWSU, WGBH, WNYC, WUOM, WXPN, NPR, PRI, and American Public Media. NPR pays for the bandwidth and everyone shares the data collected in the experiment.

At press time, NPR.org was already hosting 148 different podcasts in a beta podcast directory (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php). On the surface, it appears to be an incredibly popular service. NPR has secured underwriting for the podcasts from Acura, and ten days after NPR began listing podcasts four of the top ten ("NPR: Story of the Day," "NPR: All Songs Considered," "NPR: Technology," and "NPR Health & Science") and 16 of the top 100 podcasts downloaded from Apple Computer's iTunes music store were produced by the NPR podcasting demonstration group.

A handful of this audio originates at American Public Media (APM), where Mike Bettison is the director of new media. "Massive downloads are not enough to show this is a sustainable service," he said. More important indicators of success that this project is tracking focus not only on the number of downloads, but also on the number of listens, and the number of listeners who act on a message within the podcast. The goal is to be able to demonstrate podcasting's relevance to underwriters.

While no hard data yet exists about APM's podcast listeners, Bettison's instinct is that the Internet audience is skewing younger than traditional listeners. "Everyone's excited about the potential for podcasts, but we want to understand beyond the hype," he said. From APM's perspective the real benefit to podcast listeners is their new ability to follow stories via RSS that are topic-related. Listeners can get the information they want more quickly, without having to sit through an entire program.

It's not available as a podcast, but Bettison cites American Radio Works' September 2002 program Nature's Revenge, produced by Daniel Zwerdling, (http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/wetlands/) as a demonstration of the changing role of radio programs in the Internet Age. Nature's Revenge documents the long-standing issues with New Orleans water table and forecasts what would happen if a category five hurricane struck the city. With no promotion, a huge number of listeners downloaded the program during the 2004 hurricane season and then again before and after Hurricane Katrina. Bettison sees this as a paradigm shift for radio producers: "Realize the longevity that your work now has," he said. "It can be broadcast once -- maybe twice. But, as a document that exists on the Internet, it has the potential for an extremely long lifetime."

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, has written extensively about this phenomenon, which he calls The Long Tail (http://longtail.typepad.com/). Previously radio has been structured around "hits" (one-time terrestrial broadcasts). Podcasting and the Internet now allow broadcasters like NPR and APM to archive and distribute programs for a long time. Nature's Revenge perfectly illustrates this possibility. After the initial "hits" of a PRI broadcast and two shorter ATC segments, American Radio Works continued to stream the story from its site. Current events created a "niche" audience for the program, making it relevant to listeners once again, and by extension adding value to the program's underwriters. As a bonus, XML and RSS actually increase the value of the programming by attracting a new, niche audience that is specifically interested in stories on the themes of "hurricanes," "Katrina," or "New Orleans."

The Internet is changing the way people consume news by creating an opportunity for self-directed newsgathering. As more and more listeners turn to podcasts and Web streams, the potential exists for public-radio programming to become more of a Web experience and less of a terrestrial broadcast experience. Podcasting takes radio programming and adds a layer of metadata to it, labeling it as what Mike Bettison correctly called a "document." Until now, public radio has not experienced television news's loss of co-consumer loyalty. Now that podcasting allows listeners to grab targeted program segments, public radio will need to reassert its relevance in order to avoid fragmenting its listenership.

APM's Mike Bettison said that data collected from Web traffic doesn't influence the editorial voice of American Public Media's programs. If anything, he said that podcasting creates an opportunity for public radio to become more meaningful to its community, both at national and local levels. From Bettison's perspective, podcasting is an unproven way to connect with APM's listeners, but he is paying attention to NPR's demonstration project in the hopes of learning how public radio might lengthen its tail, gaining new listeners and new revenue.

Kerry Seed is Assistant Director and Senior Producer for Blunt Youth Radio Project (now podcasting at http://www.bluntradio.org/). He has been producing independent documentaries since 1997. Listen to samples of his work at http://kerryseed.org/ or read his thoughts on radio at http://mentalblackout.blogspot.com/. When he's not listening to his iPod, he enjoys reading novels on quiet afternoons.